Republicans again immune to their hypocrisy in Madison

This morning Milwaukee Public Radio featured two news items back to back that exemplified the hypocrisy in the Republican legislature. The announcer played it straight but I am sure someone in the newsroom understood the irony in what they were doing! I haven’t gone back and vetted every word or statement. This is just a ‘quick hit’ type of post.

First news item: legislative Republicans oppose the wind farm rules established during the Doyle Administration back in 2010 (which I am sure had plenty of exposure at the time) because we shouldn’t rush into green energy initiatives simply because we need jobs.

Second news item that immediately followed the first: legislative Republicans decry defeat of mining bill (which is less than a year old and written by the mining industry) because we need the jobs.

Don’t their heads ever hurt from hitting them on their desks so often?

7 Responses to Republicans again immune to their hypocrisy in Madison

You missed the even bigger hypocrisy of it all. They claim that wind farms have bad health effects but they care nothing about the health effects of groundwater pollution from mining and destroying wetlands. If wind farms do have bad health effects, we can fix that by turning them off and tearing them down. If our groundwater turns to poison, that will take decades to centuries to fix.

You scooped me on this one, both Ed and Mike. I was going to write a post about it this morning.

What was especially of grim hilarity is the idea that repubs wanted to protect property owners from the unsightly wind turbines and the headaches that allegedly come from the humming, but apparently a giant hole in the ground leaking acid drainage into the Bad River watershed is just the price of jobs and progress.

These modern day Repubs have a collective gift for a kind of savage hypocrisy heretofore unseen on the American political landscape.

And going forward I hope it’s going to be their demise for a generation to come.

Mike…when I was writing this in my head all afternoon, I had the environmental impact in the text, but when I had time to sit down and write it that slipped out my ears. So thanks for bringing it to the table.

Not sure how much I have left to add other than a juxtaposition of the failed Clean Energy Jobs Act vs the mining bill. The first; a comprehensive piece of legislation that would have created thousands of jobs, kept money home in Wisconsin, spread some of that money around, and placed us on the right side of history toward a sustainable, homegrown energy future. Repubs, WMC and a pair of turncoat Dems killed it.

The second, a corporate giveaway to the extraction industry with it’s finite jobs cycle, concentrated wealth generation, severe environmental risks and overall unsustainability. Repubs, WMC and one almost turncoat Dem almost passed it.

To top it off, the Clean Energy Jobs Act’s focus on climate change was prescient. Once again the insurance industry has issued a call for national climate policy, at the same time we’re seeing the most unusual winter anyone can remember in Wisconsin.

Our climate is changing, and it’s going to continue. Mother Nature doesn’t care who believes in her or not.
So we should be talking about all the biomass plants, wind farms and solar panels we could build here, along with boosting agriculture statewide, and all the long term sustainable jobs and broader prosperity they would bring. But we’re not.

We’re talking about digging a great big hole in the ground for a comparatively small handful of jobs that will be gone someday, along with the possibility that we’ll poison a watershed that flows into the largest body of freshwater in the world, so that a single company and its shareholders can generate tens of billions in profits.

And the GOP’ers think that’s just fine. But it’s an outrage to have to look at a wind turbine.

We had a chance to enter the 21st century with the Clean Energy Jobs Act. The Repubs want to take us back to the 19th century. Not even the 20th, the 19th.

It’s a multi-layered irony casserole with a large dollop of grim hypocrisy on the side.

Using hypocrisy to explain the disconnect apparent in the mining legislation is only a small example. Pro-life means (Sen Frank Lasee, Rep Garey Bies and others) attempting redefinition in the state constitution, of legal person-hood to begin at fertilization of an egg, (to criminalize abortion as murder) while raising taxes and cutting benefits to the young, the poor, the sick and the elderly legislatively, and by demanding abstinence be taught in the classrooms to increase the likely-hood of potential future abortions through neglectful ignorance of the facts being taught to young adults.

Hypocrisy is nothing short of an inherited genetic flaw in the current crop of R politicians, not a mere anomaly or fluke.

But let us not forget (with a full blown epidemic of examples from the, “how much is this recall going to cost taxpayers,” crowd) the beginning of Walker’s “jobs creation,” legislation, refusing to accept $800 plus million in DOT railroad building money.

Improve infrastructure to attract new jobs and business? Never, that might shed a decent light on that uppity POTUS and his administration. Can’t have that.